


where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes

by pyrrhlc



Series: archivist!sasha (love on a smaller stage) [4]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Archivist Sasha James, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Not-Jon, Trans Martin Blackwood, this goes without saying but i want it on the tape recorder as it were
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23880577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrrhlc/pseuds/pyrrhlc
Summary: He’s too much of a coward to say what he actually wants to – that maybe Jon would be better off in a place where at least one person knows him, or think they do. But as much as Martin has changed in the last year, he isn’t yet bold enough to invite Jon to live in his flat on a temporary basis.Martin has never liked confrontation.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Series: archivist!sasha (love on a smaller stage) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1692085
Comments: 20
Kudos: 235





	where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes

**Author's Note:**

> tw for abuse / neglect re: martin and his mother. i have a lot of thoughts about this.
> 
> this got really long so take it as a martin character study / something that actually made *me* sad whilst writing, which is an achievement
> 
> tense change bc for some reason this one was very resistant to the previous

Martin doesn’t look back even once after getting on the bus. He’s left his phone number with the nurses, should they need to ring, but he doesn’t expect it. Jon can look after himself.

The complicated knot in his stomach persists even back in his flat – even after he makes dinner, even after spending hours sorting and cleaning, the first proper clean of this place in months. He has hardly been here, recently and otherwise. It will have to stop.

Vacuuming. Dusting down shelves, folding old clothes into boxes, trying to impose any kind of order on a universe that inherently resists it. Wiping down the kitchen surfaces, wondering how things in cupboards ever got so dusty – all of that is a relief, somehow. It’s a small comfort after weeks spent vigil next to a hospital bed, disinfectant strong in his lungs, bitten into the back of his teeth. Cutting the hair of someone he doesn’t know anymore with trembling hands, someone he loves beyond reason.

Martin has never known what to do with reason, comprehensible or otherwise. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Small comforts, like rinsing out mugs and plates, cooking pasta with store-bought sauce, are comforts nonetheless. They keep him from having to face that – the way Jon’s eyes had looked at him in the hospital, dark brown and too young. They become more and more difficult to romanticise with every recollection.

Distance, he thinks, is how he will solve this. Distance and dusting and keeping his head down, not answering any questions, because after everything Martin is done with that. Sasha is still missing and Tim is still angry and he isn’t going to work, for entirely selfish reasons of his own. Elias and his empty words about strained circumstances, of the situation being easy to understand, don’t exactly cover it, do they? Not after finding Gertrude’s body under the Archives, not after Jane Prentiss, not after all of this.

And so, for three days, he chooses not to do anything but clean, and knit with shaking hands, and take those shaking hands over to the phone to confirm that _yes, Jon is fine, when will you be visiting next?_ He puts the phone down on otherwise perfectly pleasant people, deliberately misunderstanding himself, not asking any questions, certainly nothing concerning Jon. His colleague, not his friend. Certainly nothing more than that.

And Martin puts it out of his mind, then, or at least pretends to. Then he gets another phone call from the hospital, from a different phone.

“Martin?”

“Jesus Christ,” he says, because that’s what should have been said, he thinks angrily, all those weeks ago when he brought an axe into a public building, when he asked Melanie to do something as utterly stupid as he is. He doesn’t have time for amendments, apologies. He just wants to be left alone, but he clears his throat anyway, remembers to breathe. “Jon.”

He doesn’t think about his name in Jon’s mouth, soft in the way his old name never was in his mother’s, because now is not the time for that. Now is not the time for _anything_ but iron-hard certainty and division, the way he has been taught best.

Now is not the time to let Jonathan Sims into his heart.

“You haven’t been back,” Jon says, his voice a hoarse whisper on the phone, muffled by distance, telephone lines, and Martin already knows hearing it that Jon could crumble all his resolve if he wanted to, simply by asking. He doesn’t think the man newly transferred into the Archive, the man of two years before, would ever ask. He is scared to learn if this one might.

“I’ve been busy,” he lies, glancing around his now-clean flat, deliberately ignoring the boxes piled by the door, all those things from his mother’s he hadn’t been able to get rid of yet, even after she moved into the care home, even after the fragile break up of a house that they never shared as equals. “What’s wrong?”

“Uh, nothing is wrong, I suppose.” Martin thinks he is hearing someone else speak before he realises that this is what Jon sounds like when he’s not pretending. He sounds vaguely surprised. “But I – they’re discharging me today. And they asked if you were coming. They were very surprised when you, ah, disappeared.”

Disappearing is one of Martin’s natural talents. He doesn’t dwell on it. Just swallows uneasily past the lump in his throat, tries again. “Why?” he asks. The question leaves a cold feeling in his throat, like passing though fog. He doesn’t want the answer and he knows, suddenly and instinctively, that Jon isn’t going to give it. Something in his voice. Something in his eyes, though he can’t see them. He hears Jon clear his throat uneasily.

“Martin, I’ll be completely frank with you: I still don’t know how I got here. I don’t have any of my things. Not even my – my wallet, or my keys. I’m not sure I should even ask what happened to my phone.”

And Martin freezes. Just for a second, like a camera panning across the empty expanse of his living room, he thinks of the not-Jon pulling on the real Jon’s jacket, going to his flat, pretending to eat as he sits in front of empty plates and cups, pretending to sleep by lying on a bed with his eyes open, for hours. It makes him want to throw up into the boxes by his feet. Instead, he pulls himself together and takes a breath.

“I have your things,” he said faintly, though even that isn’t strictly true – he’d had to get new keys cut in order to get into Jon’s flat, but it had felt so much like intruding he hadn’t stayed long, and so much of everything will have to be created anew: Jon’s wallet and phone are about as lost as any objects are. Martin’s checked the photographs pinned to the office fridge and he knows they’re not any different, but he doesn’t know what that means for everyone else: if Martin can unlearn falsity surely anyone can, but he’s not sure they’d all take the step of believing him. Jon is a person that doesn’t really exist anymore, except for the few, and only Melanie had really _noticed_. He can’t imagine what that will mean for Jon’s family, his friends.

Thinking beyond that makes his head hurt, so he shuts that out too. “When do want me to pick you up?”

Jon inhales softly on the other end of the phone, and Martin can’t help but picture him leaning against one of the hospital pay phones, allowed out of the ward at last, or maybe he’s sneaking around undetected with an IV in his arm because that’s the sort of stupid thing Jon would do. He doesn’t know. Martin wishes dearly that he did.

“Any time, I think, is fine,” he says softly. “But I think they want me out before five. They’re doing some tests just before then.”

“All right,” Martin says, the phone clutched so tightly in his hand he’s surprised it hasn’t broken already, just like so much else. “I’ll see you at four-thirty, then. With your stuff.”

A sound like a swallow, a sudden hitch of breath. They’re not going to talk about it, he realises. They’re not going to talk about what happened. Not yet. “OK,” Jon says, and it frightens Martin that he can hear the smile there, wobbly, paper-thin, fragile as glass. Jon doesn’t smile – not as he remembers him, not really. “See you then.”

*

It occurs to Martin halfway out of the door that he should probably take his mother’s car. The thought fills him with such paralysing fear for a moment then he loses sight of the keys in his hand and has to slump back against the wall, breathing deep, trying to unlearn the vicious knots tied around his ribcage, strangling his lungs. It’s no more his mother’s car than the car he used to drive her around in – he’s not so completely useless as to have never learnt. But equally, that car was never used for anything else. His desire for crowded buses, even the Underground, is far greater than the desire to drive that car again, even after months of not going to see her.

But he can’t expect Jon, a man missing ten months’ worth of memories and God knows what else, to get the tube with him. So Martin swallows his doubts again, picks up the second set of keys, and pulls on his coat.

He blatantly refuses to acknowledge anything about the old Ford: not the clutter in the glove compartment, not the lingering smell of talc and shampoo, not his pale, shady reflection in the glass as he locks the door, strengthens his resolve. He still hasn’t come up with a plan beyond turning up at the hospital. Martin hopes his heart is stronger than it so rightly feels.

Pulling into the hospital car park, as opposed to walking in through the usual entrance, brings back another wealth of memories he doesn’t have time to concern himself with. Martin makes his way through the corridors in silence, pulling at the neck of his jumper uncomfortably as he goes. He’s been killing time ever since getting the phone call and no doubt it shows in the strained contours of his face, the lines of his mouth. Small, subtler signs of wear, to add to the collection of scars on his face. He wonders if Jon would be equally horrified by both – this realisation that Martin has aged.

He checks in with reception, quietly and carefully, ignoring the raised eyebrows of the nurse, and then before he has time to process he’s back in that same room, Jon’s face breaking into an uncertain smile as he glances up at the opening of the door, sitting on the end of the hospital bed with his tufty hair sticking up in all directions.

“Martin.”

“Hi.” He glances sideways at the nurse who’d followed him in, who smiles with another half-raised eyebrow before leaving and closing the door behind her. Martin doesn’t breathe any easier for it as he puts the box of clothes down beside the bed. His bag is where he left it three days before but the bookmark he’d left in the book has moved, the corners shiny and well-thumbed. He sees Jon glance at it uneasily as he picks up his satchel, nods at the box. “I brought you some clothes.”

“Thank you.”

Martin sits down heavily in the chair, keeping his head low as Jon stands up, the box in his hands as he disappears behind the hospital screen at the other end of the room. They should not have come to this, Martin thinks sadly. He doesn’t know exactly what he means even as he thinks it, but the awkward stiffness of Jon’s movements as he shuffles from one place to the other feels too vulnerable for Martin to see. That was what was keeping him away, he thinks: not just the fear of having to know someone again, or Jon trying to figure out who he was after all this time – all this time and too many scars – but the inherent intimacy and trust of having to see the other suffer and not be able to do anything about it.

He doesn’t want Jon to hate him for this, though he should. Martin is more afraid than he could ever admit that it might happen again – that he might cause someone to hate him again, just for being there when someone else is not. That, more than anything, is the thing that makes him want to run away. Run away and never, ever look back.

_But life doesn’t work like that, does it? You can’t just leave him. He doesn’t even know what really happened._

Martin does not want this job. He loves immoderately but he does not wish to risk being loved or known in return. Maybe after this he will go home again and start cleaning his bookshelf, finally take out those boxes. If he is doing he cannot be thinking.

“Martin,” Jon says, stepping out from behind the screen, and for a moment Martin can almost envision that nothing has happened at all, because that mix of confusion and incredulity in Jon’s voice is as familiar as anything ever could be. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but where did you get these?”

Well, if they’re going to talk about it, he thinks, they might as well talk about it now. “The first time I went to your flat,” he says – still looking down at his knees, because the sight of Jonathan Sims in anything less than a shirt and tie might kill him, regardless of any other eldritch entities keeping an eye on them – “I didn’t really look. But I went back again this afternoon, and … well. A lot of your stuff is gone.”

“This shirt is mine, though.”

“Lucky for you that Georgie Barker kept so much of your stuff.”

Jon chokes in a way that would be endearing, even funny to Martin if his heart wasn’t so full of something else. Melanie knowing Georgie had helped. She’d managed to explain the situation before leaving, at least guaranteeing a woman Martin didn’t know wouldn’t try and call him insane upon introduction. But knowing and having to actually make the unpleasant phone call – well, those were two different things. He hasn’t relished this afternoon.

“Well, I suppose it’s something, at least,” Jon says in a voice that’s trying so hard to be polite that Martin does laugh, just a little. He stands up. “Though I’m not so sure I ever owned a mustard jumper.”

It’s at this point Martin realises he might have gotten Jon’s things and the donation boxes a little mixed up. He breathes in, raises his head, still slightly unprepared for the sight of a very small, very dishevelled man in a very large jumper that he remembers making so well it almost hurts. The sleeves are hanging over his hands.

Martin bites down his lip to quell the butterflies in his stomach just as Jon looks up at him, clutching at his elbows rather self-consciously, but smiling too. Smiling at Martin in a way that is completely unhindered by sarcasm, of feigned politeness. He doesn’t know where to put it, so he looks away.

Any hurt in Jon’s voice has to be imagined, he tells himself, even as Jon picks up the box and asks, “I take it you have my keys, then?”

“Yes. I brought my – my car.”

Jon blinks. “I didn’t know you drove.”

“It’s London. Most of the time there’s not much point.”

There’s enough truth in the lie that Jon doesn’t stop to question it – or maybe he’s just being polite, trying to spare Martin’s feelings. If he doesn’t hate Martin then he must at least think that Martin hates _him_. Perhaps it wouldn’t be sure a bad thing to have him believe, Martin thinks wearily. It would certainly make dropping Jon off at his flat easier, freeing him of the obligation of being asked to help.

Or, maybe, it would make things ten times worse than they already are. He really doesn’t know.

“Martin? Are you all right?”

He looks up again at the man wearing a jumper he’d knitted for his mother – the one she’d chosen never to wear, whether out of spite or distaste or something else. He decides that Jon looks better in it than his mother ever would’ve, and the strange, heavy feeling he’s been carrying around in his heart suddenly feels a little lighter. He nods, stretching his lips into a thin smile.

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

*

They’re almost at Jon’s flat when they hit the first bit of real traffic – a small miracle in London, if Martin’s being honest with himself, but it still makes him uncomfortable: the silence in the car is taut as the skin of a balloon. He glances sideways at Jon, sees him looking back with that new expression of his: confused mouth, a tiny frown between his eyebrows. Martin keeps catching himself with the urge to reach out and smooth it away, maybe even hold Jon’s hand, but he’s always driving and he’s also – well. He shouldn’t be thinking any of those things, really. Not now. Not at all.

“You look tired,” Jon says at last, in a voice that is both familiar and isn’t. “I’m sorry for putting you to so much trouble.”

“You think this is trouble?” Martin asks, without thinking about it, and immediately regrets it as Jon’s face quicksilvers through sorrow and something else – something that Martin might think was surprise, if he hadn’t known better, and he does. He shrugs to cover up his own embarrassment, not taking his eyes off the road as he merges into another lane. “It’s fine, honestly. I don’t see who else is gonna – well. It was a lot. And Melanie’s in India now, so.”

Jon’s frown grows – if possible – even more pronounced. “Melanie? From GhostHunt UK?”

“That’s the one.”

“She came in to give a statement, didn’t she?”

“Yes, she did. And I listened to it, by the way. You were quite rude.”

Jon’s mouth twists into a half-smile, and Martin tries not to think about the fact that it was that tape that led him under the Archives, to seek out Melanie. “Yes, well. A clash of personalities, and all that. But I don’t see what Melanie has to do with this.”

“She, um.” Martin is finding it very difficult to concentrate on the road, suddenly; he makes a conscious effort not to turn his head, because looking into Jon’s eyes even for a second may well get both of them killed. “She remembered you, when the others didn’t. She came in to give a statement and – oh, Jesus, you don’t have any tea in your cupboard.”

Jon sounds almost indignant at the interruption. It shouldn’t make Martin’s heart fond, but it does. “What’s tea got to do with anything?”

“Jon, I can’t talk about this without tea. As well as you’re taking everything – well, I need a drink. Never mind. Um, Melanie asked where you were. She said she’d been shown in by a different Jon, and Sasha said – well, you know,” he adds hastily, already regretting the decision to have this conversation while driving. Jon makes a wounded sound in the back of his throat that makes Martin want to reach out and grab him, for all his resolve, for all his emotional distancing that’s going so, so well. He hardly knows who that would benefit the most, or who he really wants it for.

“Sasha said that was the same person, I’m assuming,” Jon completes, and despite the slight tremor in his voice he doesn’t seem that upset, just – confused. Or maybe Martin is reading him completely wrong and he’s just gotten bed at hiding how he really feels. “And Melanie – what?”

“I’d really prefer to have this conversation later.”

“Martin, you disappeared for three days, please don’t do this to me.”

It’s as close to snappish as Jon’s gotten the entire car ride, and in some weird way Martin actually feels grateful for it. It makes things feel more normal, more manageable. He turns off the main road at a slightly sharper angle than he means to. “I can’t, OK? You don’t understand. Give me chance, Jon, Christ.”

They don’t say anything for the rest of the journey. Martin makes sure not to look at Jon, even out of the corner of his eye, until they pull up outside his flat. The building has as many windows as the Magnus Institute and makes Martin just as uneasy.

“D’you want a hand?”

“No,” Jon says, but softly, and Martin just rolls his eyes at him, sliding out of the car and crossing over to Jon’s side before pulling open the door, his hand outstretched with an expression he hopes looks like sympathy, or something close to it, at least. He’s had to deal with so many unusual things about the now-usual Jon so far but at least his stubbornness is the same: Martin thinks it would take a hell of a lot to convince him to let that trait go. Expecting a stand-off is a given.

He looks at Martin for a long moment before sighing and reaching back, and they make their way over to the flat entrance with Jon taking slow, cautious footsteps all the way, his arm clutching at Martin’s rather broader shoulders. Martin rests a tentative hand in the small of Jon’s back and tries not to flinch away from the boldness of his ribs, just under his skin, the jutting knobs of his spine, like he’s barely made of anything at all.

Fresh viciousness and rage bleeds into him again as he remembers the well-fed, narrowed smile of the Not-Jon, wonders if he approached this door every night thinking of the real Jon down in the tunnels, kept alive just for – what, exactly? Even now he realises he doesn’t know, and he certainly doesn’t want to ask Jon if he remembers. He’s not even sure he actually wants the answer, come to that.

The inside of the building is dark and slightly cramped, with well-flattened carpet that smells of mothballs. Martin glances over at the far corner to the lift, hiding like a monster in the shadows, cursing when he sees the sign taped to the doors. He glances sideways at Jon.

“It’s two floors, right?”

“Three. I’ll be all right.”

He resists the urge to keep holding onto him as Jon lets go of his shoulders, limping cautiously towards the trestle table where the occupants’ mail is laid out. Martin doesn’t realise what he’s looking for until Jon says, quietly, “I don’t know any of these people.”

Martin feels his stomach drop unpleasantly, walks over to lay a hand on Jon’s shoulder, before changing his mind and pulling back. “Well, it is London,” he says, and it already feels like an excuse in his mouth. “People move in and out all the time.”

“All of them?”

Martin doesn’t have an answer to that, though he suspects it has something to do with the Institute. The growing feeling of dread he’d first felt in the car intensifies now to the point where it’s almost unbearable. But he’s too much of a coward to say what he actually wants to – that maybe Jon would be better off in a place where at least one person knows him, or think they do. But as much as Martin has changed in the last year, he isn’t yet bold enough to invite Jon to live in his flat on a temporary basis.

“Come on, then.” He tries to say it with enthusiasm, but he can tell by the way Jon is looking at him that he sounds as flat as Jon feels, as flat as this entire hallway. The bright red front door, even marred by the fumes of passing traffic, is the only cheerful thing about this place, and none of that can be seen from the inside. He forces a smile. “Those stairs won’t climb themselves.”

He is not, he thinks, as Jon links his arm again with his, much of a good person if he can lie to himself like this. But that’s not as much of a passing concern as it once was, and Martin banishes it easily to the back of his mind as they start on the stairs.

*

Tea, as it turns out, is not the only thing Jon is missing.

“I’ll go down to the shop,” Martin says, trying not to fiddle with the neck of his jumper as he watches Jon flit around in his half-kitchen, cupboard to cupboard like he’s trying to prove Martin wrong. It would be another endearing thing if not for the frightful expression on his face. “Just write me a list, I’ll go get it.”

“I don’t understand,” Jon says, and he stops opening the cupboards, instead just standing there with his arms by his sides, looking back at clean empty shelves. “Martin, I don’t get it.”

“I don’t either,” he says, all the time kicking himself now for not checking the rest of Jon’s flat, for not realising how it is so lacking – not just in clothes and food but in comfort and familiarity too. There is no television in the living room opposite, something which Martin can believe of Jon very well, but equally he knows those bookshelves were not empty of books when Jon left this place to go to work ten months before. The feeling it inspires in him feels like snakes writhing in his stomach. “We can fix it though. We can get food.”

Jon closes the cupboard in front of him very quietly and gently, like it’s costing everything in him not to slam every window and door in the place. “I don’t have any plates,” he says, and when he turns and looks at him Martin has to fight the urge to dodge his gaze, to be anywhere but here. “You’ll be hard-pressed to find those in the off-licence. And my books – is there anything of me here that’s actually intact?”

Martin is quite sure Jon doesn’t mean to raise his voice, because as soon as their eyes meet all the colour seems to drain out of him and he sits back against the counter, defeated. “God, Martin. I’m sorry, I – I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK.”

“It’s clearly not, is it.” Jon hugs his elbows for a moment, then stands up, offering his hand. “Sit with me?”

He doesn’t understand why his fingers are shaking, why all of him feels so very worn down to the foundations – there probably isn’t any rhyme or reason to it, he thinks, and it certainly isn’t because Jon raised his voice. Not really. Or probably, actually, he’s been expecting this from the beginning.

It’s not like Jon hasn’t lost his temper with Martin before, and this isn’t even _at_ Martin, he’s just _here._ He’s – well, he’s in the way like he’s always been, and maybe that’s why he feels like he does, so weighted nothing might not matter at all.

He tells himself all of these things even as Jon, apparently content not to get answer, clasps his fingers and tugs him towards the battered couch the former claims he bought from a nice charity shop in Clerkenwell. It will strike Martin later as very absurd statement, knowing as he does that Jon is a hater of anything fancy. For now his only focus is the staccato rhythm of his heart in his chest.

Jon doesn’t say anything for a very long moment, but he doesn’t look away and he keeps his spindly hands clasped tightly around Martin’s in a way he would find endearing if he were the invalid. But instead his brain is full of static and all he can focus on is his own breathing, in and out, crooked as a broken fairground ride. His vision is hardly more than a few colours pasted together and there is a horrific headache building behind his eyes which he knows he will have to take painkillers for later.

“Martin.”

“What?” The word is thick, more breath than intent. He feels Jon’s grip on his hand tighten, like he’s trying to anchor them both.

“Breathe.”

The world rights itself, by degrees, and very slowly Martin becomes aware of Jon’s shoulder pressing into his, their knees so close that there is no more space than atoms between them. It’s frankly embarrassing how much it means to have that little contact, but it does the job. It grounds him. He breathes.

“I am, truly, very sorry,” Jon says, his voice low and rough like he’s trying to keep as much emotion as possible out of his voice, but it’s not working very well. “I see what you meant about the tea.”

A hollow laugh escapes him; he can’t help it. “I was always making you tea,” he says at last. “At least I think I was. And you said – there was always something wrong with it. I think I remember that.”

“You think?”

“The longer you’re here, the more I remember what you were really like. Melanie remembered exactly who you were, but I – I had to keep reminding myself. I kept forgetting what you looked like even when I was looking for you. And now … now you’re here.”

“Here I am,” Jon parrots softly. “Seems an awful lot of effort to go to for someone who complained about your tea,” he adds, and Martin feels something inside him break just a little at that, the quiet self-deprecation in Jon’s voice. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. Maybe if you hadn’t been such an ass I wouldn’t have noticed. It seems to have worked out.”

Jon scowls. “ _Martin_.”

Anxiety floods his lungs again. “Sorry,” he says, and there is quiet again for a moment. Martin can feel his pulse beating wildly in his ears, but he knows better than to try and stop it from overwhelming him – sometimes these things just happen. He tries to focus on his breathing again, feels Jon’s arm settle around his shoulder and tries to stifle the desire to shake him off.

“You don’t need do do that,” he bites, “I can take of myself. It’s not your job.”

Jon stiffens for a second but he doesn’t let go, or move away. “It’s not yours, either,” he says, his voice so quiet that Martin could choose not to hear him if he wanted to, though he does – desperately enough that he hates himself for it. “Not all the time. It doesn’t have to be.”

Martin has not had the space to think those kind of thoughts in years; he won’t start now. “Let go,” he says, and Jon does, though he doesn’t say anything else. Martin stands up, turning to face him without actually looking him in the eyes. “I’ll go get your food. I’m sure even the off-licence here has paper plates, they’ll do.”

“Martin, please—”

“It’s fine, Jon. It’s fine.” He puts as much emphasis on _fine_ as he can, moves towards the door. “If you end up needing anything else I can always drive into town.”

“No,” Jon says, and where there should be iron-hard certainty in his voice there is only a tremble. “I’m not about to give you a ready-made excuse to run away from me. Not again.”

He is so close to the door of the sitting room he could reach out and turn the handle, disappear for twenty minutes while he writes internal monologues in his head about how stupid he’s been, dropping tins of spaghetti hoops and tomatoes into a wire basket and feeding off his righteous anger until it burns out again and he feels small and childish and lonely. It happens every time he leaves a situation without talking about it and nine times out of ten Martin is fine with that, especially where his mother is concerned. He knows perfectly well how to leave a conversation and still feel bitter about it, but this is – well.

This is not the same.

Jon is still sat on the couch and the look of hurt in his eyes is enough to leave anyone swimming in their own guilt, let alone Martin. He’s too slow to stop him leaving and Martin hates beyond belief that he can see that in Jon’s eyes, that he knows his whole thought process before he even speaks. He wants answers but Martin is tired of receiving questions without ever getting to ask any of his own. To say the world doesn’t work fairly doesn’t exactly cover it, he thinks.

It’s not Jon’s fault. That doesn’t make him feel any less angry.

Martin sighs, steps away and sits down on the arm of the couch, far enough that Jon can't reach out to give him the comfort he thinks he needs. It seems, at the time, an important distinction to make.

“Look,” he says, and hates himself for the way he sounds accusatory, for the way Jon looks at him with such wariness, bruised and thin and skating the edge of what it means to have no knowledge at all. “Not to sound like an asshole, and I know I do, but just – leave me out of this, OK? I don’t want to talk about me. I thought this was going to be easy.”

“Funny way to go about it,” Jon says, just casual enough to hurt. “Running away and coming back only to avoid all my questions.”

“I told you, it’s complicated,” Martin snaps back. “A lot of things happened when you were gone. I thought – I thought you were gone for good. Or, or that I was being paranoid and that you were the same you always were, because that’s what I’m dealing with, OK? That – thing that made everyone think it was you, it isn’t dead, it isn’t over,” he adds, and even as he says it he knows it’s true, knows it in the deepest and most terrible parts of himself, the parts that are used to accepting awful truths, and swallowing them whole. “And – d’you think I enjoyed explaining to your ex-girlfriend that her memory was lying to her? I didn’t think it would ever come to this. When I found you down there I thought you were dead.”

Jon looks as hopelessly lost as Martin’s ever seen him, but he finds he doesn’t care. “Down where?”

“Down – oh, this is so stupid. There are tunnels beneath the Institute, OK? We tried to kill that thing, me and Melanie, and it chased us down there and then it – it was gone. And there you were,” he adds bitterly, “looking like you’d had your heart torn open and what the hell was I supposed to do then? We moved on. I managed. So I _don’t_ need looking after, thank you very much.”

“Martin, that’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“It’s not what I heard. You don’t get to – to patronise me, or whatever, not for this. It’s hard enough without you looking at me like that. I don’t have to be here.”

Jon opens his mouth to speak, then seems to think better of it, dipping his head to stare at the mustard wool pooled in his lap. “I know you don’t have to,” he says at last, and his voice sounds like the voice he used on the telephone, so tentative and unlike the person he knew before that it makes Martin want to throw up. Then he remembers his supposed resolve, and stands up off the couch, watching him. “But I appreciate it, Martin. More than I can say. You don’t have to do anything else. You can go.”

Martin scrubs at his eye with the palm of his hand. “I don’t want to,” he says, and that, at least, is the truth. “I can’t.”

“I’ll get by.”

“No, you won’t. You can barely walk. I should at least—” He looks left out of the window, where the sun has long since dipped below the horizon. He can see his car, not so far below. It might as well be at the bottom of the sea. “I can get food,” he says, though by the way Jon’s head turns towards him he can tell there’s about as much conviction in his voice as it sounds. “I can make a mean pasta dish, when I want to. It doesn’t take much.”

Jon smiles, the expression tentative and still unusual on his face, taut at the corners like it might snap back like a rubber band at any moment. “That would be nice,” he says, taking the amnesty for what it is. He bites his lip, glances away again like there’s something he wants to add but doesn’t know how. “Will you stay, after?”

“What?”

“You don’t have to,” Jon says quickly, trying to stand up, and it’s only Martin’s guilt about shouting at him that makes him step closer to give him a hand. “I just thought – I don’t know. I’m willing to bet all the other cupboards are just as empty, so there’s not much to do. But I wouldn’t mind the company.”

They are still holding hands. Martin steps back quickly, takes about a second to think about how empty Jon’s kitchen is, how it will be impossible to cook anything except takeaway without saucepans and knives and wooden spoons, then offers his second olive branch.

“Come stay at mine,” he says, the smallest amount of resignation in his voice, because he doesn’t want this, not really – not in the sense his stuffy old romantic heart has always dreamed of. He’s tired and fed up and he wants to be alone, but maybe that isn’t actually right. He certainly can’t leave Jon to his own devices tonight. He doesn’t even have a phone. “Until you’ve got everything together, I mean. I can sleep on the sofa, you can take the bed.”

“Martin, I can’t let you do that.”

“Can’t you? Do you really want to stay here?”

He watches Jon with half a mind to carry him bodily out of the flat if he disagrees, but instead he just lifts a hand to his newly shorn hair, thumbing the bristles. “You did this, didn’t you.”

“Yes,” Martin says, though it isn’t actually a question. “They were going to attack you with a pair of clippers. I thought you might cry.”

Jon cracks a smile at that. “I well might,” he says. And then, after another fleeting glance at Martin, adds helplessly, “Oh, fine. I’ll stay. But I’ll take the sofa; I can’t kick you out of your own bed.”

**Author's Note:**

> ty for reading! please leave kudos and/or a comment if you're so inclined. it makes me very happy <3


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